The underpinnings of setting

Thanks for all your good wishes! I’m feeling much better this week.

This week, I wanted to talk about setting.

Setting is one of the “big three” things that scenes can contribute to (the other two being characterization and plot), but most writing advice focuses more intensely on characters and plot. While setting does come up fairly often, it’s rare to find a deep dive into the underpinnings and consistency of setting. Writers are urged to understand the psychology of their characters and the structure of their stories, but when setting comes up, advice usually focuses on culture, history, and politics. Which are important, but they ignore geology, geography, and landscape, which are the building blocks that underlie setting.

Geology is what underpins all three of the others in real life. Unless one of your characters is a geologist or involves mining, geology is usually invisible in fiction. For stories set in the real world, or on an “alternate Earth” that closely approximates Earth physically, geology can be pretty much taken for granted. If one wants to design a mostly-realistic imaginary world from scratch, however, geology can be part of the pre-writing world design. Knowing why mountain ranges are placed where they are, why certain areas are subject to earthquakes or volcanoes and others aren’t, or how the availability of minerals and ores affected technological development (inventing bronze is astronomically more difficult if one has to import tin or copper over long distances, for example) can, in some cases, prevent mistakes that are really obvious to people who know how this stuff works.

On the other hand, sometimes a writer just wants to write a story set in a world where all of the volcanoes and deserts form a wide band around the equator, with oceans forming stripes above and below the equatorial desert, lush forests and grasslands making the next stripes, and so on. In those cases, the author has gone straight to setting, without worrying about the realism or plausibility, and that’s fine…as long as the world is internally consistent and makes sense to the characters. (In some cases, the author has deliberately rewritten the actual scientific rules of how geology works, the way some writers rewrite the laws of physics or invent complex rules for how and why magic works.)

Geography is the way the surface of the world is laid out—the mountains, rivers, lakes, volcanoes, earthquake zones, oceans, archipelagoes, etc. Large scale geography is usually only important if the characters are going to be traveling through it. Fantasy quest stories sometimes use geography as a way of demonstrating just how far the characters have to travel—they spent weeks crossing the desert, then they had to get through the mountain pass, and then a week of traveling through forests that gave way to plains and eventually to more mountains…

Local geography can be important in a story, or it can be ignored because the viewpoint character takes it for granted (but the hills in San Francisco, the river bluffs in Pittsburgh, the weird way Denver sits between pancake-flat plains to the east and enormous sharp-edged mountains on the west are all local geography that go a long way toward giving a sense of place to stories that might otherwise be almost generic urban settings). Geography can be a major or minor obstacle in a story, or it can be a metaphor for something the protagonist has to deal with, or it can evoke a mood or a sense of place.

Landscape in fiction is not the same as “landscaping” (which in this taxonomy would fall under “setting”). Landscape is a combination of the environment as the characters see and experience it, and the characters’ emotional reaction to it. Individuals can react very differently to different landscapes—the “big sky” of the flat, treeless plains in the western Dakotas and eastern Montana gave some settlers such severe agoraphobia that they gave up and went back East, while others saw it as endless possibility. Similarly, the forests of the northeast can be claustrophobic or frightening for some, and cozy or comforting for others. Being aware of landscape and the ways different characters respond to it give writers the opportunity to draw more vivid word-pictures of both places and characters.

Setting goes beyond the natural environment to include the effects that people have had—not just buildings, roads, and bridges, but the way houses are built and decorated, inside and out. This is obviously affected both by the geography and landscape—the place—that the story is set, and by the time and culture in which the story is taking place.

A lot of writers find the history, culture, and politics of setting more interesting to make up (or research) than landscape and geography (and if the story is set on Earth or an alternate version of Earth, the history, culture, and politics are all the writer needs to make up—the geography and geology are given, and so is the “hard” landscape. Only the characters’ emotional reactions to landscape have any wiggle room.) But if you look at actual history, culture, and politics, an awful lot of it has been shaped by landscape, geography, and even geology. Looking at the interaction between the layout of the natural physical world and the way history developed also allows writers to create interesting and unusual points of divergence.

What if the land bridge between Siberia and Alaska never disappeared? What if the last ice age was longer (or shorter)? What if a key mountain pass never developed (or the author moved it several hundred miles, affecting either trade routes or invasion routes)? What effect would the presence or absence of important minerals have on trade and/or technological development?